Population Council Projects | The End of the Fertility Transition in the Developed World

PROJECT
The End of the Fertility Transition
in the Developed World

Fertility has dropped below the replacement level in most populations that have moved through the demographic transition. This trend was not widely anticipated by demographers, and until recently relatively little attention has been given to understanding the causes and consequences of low fertility in post-transitional societies. Proponents of the “birth dearth” hypothesis believe that fertility will remain at this low level, resulting in future population declines and rapid aging.

An alternative partial explanation for this low fertility is that women are postponing births to later ages, which temporarily depresses fertility because of so-called tempo distortions. According to this view current low fertility is unlikely to decline much further and may even rise somewhat in the future in a number of post-transitional countries.

An in-depth analysis of recent cohort and period fertility trends demonstrated that the most widely used measures of fertility indeed contain substantial tempo distortions, thus giving misleading estimates of actual levels and trends in childbearing in many post-transitional countries. These tempo effects are the result of ongoing increases in the mean age at childbearing and are therefore temporary in nature. Once this rise in the mean age at childbearing ends, the corresponding fertility-depressing effect stops, thus putting upward pressure on period fertility.

Such an upward trend has already been observed in the United States, where fertility rose from 1.75 in the mid-1970s to 2.0 in the 1990s. In addition, in a few European countries fertility declines came to an end and fertility increased slightly in the late 1990s (e.g., France and the Netherlands). Further evidence supporting this conclusion is found in the fact that the total fertility rate in most of these countries is well below the desired family size of about two children. The implication is that countries with very low fertility in Europe and elsewhere could well experience a period of modest rises in fertility in the near future if the timing of childbearing stabilizes. However, even if this happens it seems unlikely that fertility will climb back to the replacement level.

Location

Selected developed countries

Duration

1997–2005

Population Council researchers

John Bongaarts, Geoffrey McNicoll

Non-Council collaborators

Griffith Feeney (consultant)

Donors

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Population Council

Publications/Resources on this project